my os is vista home premium 64 bit. sometimes (i'm not doing anything in particular), i feel that the computer is starting to slow down. so i open up task manager, and instead of using its usual 1.4gb of ram (or so), its instead using 2gb! so i checked the processes, and nothing big was running. however, i saw that taskeng.exe duplicated itself about 50 times, and whenever the computer is running normally, there's only 1 of em (i think).

after doing some research, people suggested i disable it. something to do with a task scheduler? however, i wasn't able to. plus people said this is a very important function and not to disable it. as far as i can tell, this isn't caused by a virus, and i did a scan just in case. any thoughts? perhaps its vista screwing up with a particular program or something?

i already told you, i can't access task scheduler. maybe i need to fix that first.

EDIT: ok, i'm not sure if this is related but a few months ago, when i installed a cracked halo 2, i had to replace my mf.dll file. ever since then, whenever i turn on my computer, i get this error message:windows media player network sharing service stopped working and was closed

and whenever i try running a few window based programs (such as media player), i get this message: media foundation protected pipeline exe has stopped working.

i'm quite certain that this is why task scheduler doesn't work. i googled both of these problems, but their solutions had to do with updating drivers for things i didn't have, and nothing to do with the mf.dll file. but these problems specifically arose when i changed that file, so i'm sure that's the cause.

you kinda answered your own problem here when you was asking for the mf.dll file ... you just need to put it back ... the hack of halo caused this as you overwrote it with a different version to the one you had before

another tip is if your using the DFX plugin for WMP or WINAMP disable it and see if that resolves the issue when loading WMP

but .... best advice is to replace the dll file from the same version of windows + service pack that you are currently using